Background:

Questions about access policies and censorship experiences in Canadian public libraries raise important social policy issues:

• How do public librarians strike an ethical balance between their community responsibility to facilitate open access to materials and citizen demands for censorship?

• Which voices find expression in library collections?

There are also empirical questions:

• What are the extent and nature of pressures on Canadian public libraries to censor materials in their collections?

• How do they respond to these pressures -- do they remove, restrict, or retain the offending items?

This project -- the first nation-wide survey of its kind -- was designed to provide a solid empirical base of information about censorship pressures and practices, and thereby to shed light on the climate of intellectual freedom in public libraries across the country.

Created: Tuesday, February 20, 1996 - 2:03:22 PM.
Last Updated: Tuesday, February 20, 1996 - 5:24:33 PM.

Page created by Cory Stier.